Laurence Sheets was seething.
“You fuck!” he screamed. “How am I going to explain this to Reuters?”
Not bothering to suggest that maybe I had literally taken the flak for our whole group, I managed to say that if the ceramic chest plates were one-timers, then perhaps they were overrated as protection.
“It stopped that bullet, ass!” shouted Uncle Larry.
“And the second?” I asked rhetorically.
“That’s not the point!”
“It is the point,” I loudly suggested. “Am I supposed to stand up and ask everyone to stop shooting while I change plates?”
The Russian grunts chortled. Having two foreign journalists screaming at each other in front of everyone was better fun than having almost just shot one.
A helicopter landed, kicking up dirt. A much-epauletted officer got off and scuttled over to the base. General Antonov, perchance? No telling, but at least some good visual action. Takeoff, landing, and menacing overflight. It soon got better.
Distantly, down the road and to the left, at the base of the Sundja Hills, came the dust devils. One, two, five, ten. Growing. Tanks. Lots of them. A whole column. Crossing the road. Now on the right side, moving toward the Post 13 trenches, and beyond. A dozen APCs; no, a score or more. A dozen howitzers and at least that many T-72 and T-83 battle tanks. And kitchen trucks, and jeeps, and ammunition wagons. The turrets and aprons of all vehicles were crowded with grunts dressed in Rambo-black, pirate scarves cinched around their foreheads, sitting beneath the red hammer and sickle flag of the defunct USSR, instead of the Russian tricolor. An army was on the move.
I put my camera down on its tripod at an angle that would capture the armor as it rolled by the base. A tidal wave of dust started to float over us until it obscured virtually everything. The only way to track the column was to try and see where the dust started and stopped.
“And now, Bamut,” I heard one of the grunt guards chuckle to another mate.
“What unit is that?” I asked.
“Three-sixty-sixth, I think,” said one of the grunts.
The 366th. That was the unit held responsible for the massacre at Xodjali in Azerbaijan back in 1992, when the Karabkah Armenians decided to make an example out of that little town, killing nearly a thousand souls.
Distracted by the column, no one else seemed to notice the car coming down the road from Sernovodsk under a white flag. It pulled up in front of the APC and two elderly men got out. To all the other journalists gathered around, the pair probably just looked like local farmers. To me, they looked like ghosts. One was Lema Abdulkhajiev, the head of the local administration in Samashki, a man I did not know well. The other was Akhmad Amaev, the Samuel Pepys of Samashki. Both were supposed to be dead, killed along with the other elders on the night of April 6, in one of the acts the Russian command used to justify the attack on the town. Something was very wrong.
Throwing off all protocols learned in my time in Samashki concerning respect of youth toward age, I rushed over to greet Amaev. He was as stunned to see me as I him.
“We have been used, horribly used!” he hissed. “We are all alive!”
Sheets was at my side; I quickly brought him up to speed.
“I must go,” said Amaev, trying to break away. “I have to negotiate with these animals about getting out the wounded, the women and children.”
“You must tell the world the truth, that you are alive.”
“I must go.”
“You must tell us, and on camera. For the sake of the truth and history.”
The soldiers atop the APC were absorbed in something else—the magnificence of the armored column that just rolled by, the gaggle of foreign correspondents and aid workers on the far side of the vehicle, or maybe just the fourth playing of “Smoke on the Water” on their cassette player. I covered Sheets as he turned his camera on Amaev.
“In return for the demilitarization of the town and our allowing the armored train to pass through, [General] Antonov agreed that we would be allowed a self-appointed police force of twenty men, and that no Russian troops would enter the town,” the diarist said in a hushed voice. “As a token of good faith we delivered eight assault rifles and brought them here. But that same night Antonov changed his mind and delivered a new ultimatum: We would find and deliver 264 more weapons or face the storming of the town. We were frantic, because there were not 264 weapons to be collected, and most of the fighting men had already left the town for the forest. We managed to collect another sixteen weapons—but by then the bombing had already begun. Everything else is a lie, a lie!”
“How many dead?”
“Hundreds, I don’t know. Women and children mainly, and elders.”
“And your son’s commander, Hussein?” I asked.
Amaev looked at me oddly.
“I must go,” said Amaev, and was gone.
It started as a trickle. It never became a flood. Just slow and periodic waves of people, trudging toward us down the road from Samashki, past the APC and Post 13, toward Sernovodsk. Ancient men in their papakhs and leather boots, silent, broken, followed by knots of weeping women, mud-stained and dirty, carrying bundles that were or had been children. Older kids held white flags, and sometimes smiled.
“Bodies, bodies, everywhere!” screamed a woman of perhaps twenty, the only person to break down in front of the spectators at Post 13, journalists and soldiers alike. “Children, women, aged!”
I searched among the faces of the survivors until I found someone I knew. She arrived in the person of Bekhist Abdulayeva, a lady who lived near the red brick house that served as a frontline sniper’s nest. I barely recognized her for the grime and exhaustion and trauma scratched over every surface of her face.
“Toms,” she sighed, seeing me, reaching for me.
“Get in the car,” I said commandeering someone’s vehicle—that of Voice of America correspondent Elizabeth Arnold? It was difficult to recall. The main point was that it did not seem wise to hear about the slaughter in Samashki in front of all the Russian grunts.
“When the bombardment began, we hid in the cellar,” croaked Bekhist as we sped toward Sernovodsk, relating to me for the first time what would become a monotonous mantra of murder. “Then the soldiers came in, laughing and swearing and shooting at anything that moved. I pleaded with them to spare us, telling them that there were no militants or young men with us in the basement, but they threw in their ‘lemons’ anyway.”
A lemon is a fragmentary hand grenade.
Bekhist could not recall the day her house was destroyed, because the wave of assault seemed to ebb and flow and night became confused with day. Nor did she know what had happened to her children, who had disappeared during the course of the attack.
“Tell me the same thing, but in Chechen,” I urged her, setting up my camera in front of the mosque at Sernovodsk. I am not sure if she gave a more elaborate version of events but she was soon surrounded by a wall of local residents and refugees who were openly weeping—and Chechens do not cry. Bekhist paused, looked around at the world as if for the last time, and then slumped to the ground. I thought she died of a heart attack, but she had only fainted dead away.
Whatever she said, however, created near panic. Men were running to their cars, pulling onto the road to race toward Post 13 and, I presume, Samashki.